The Angry Drunk

Add Mike Monteiro to the list of people who actually understand the iPad. The money quote:

The people don’t want “tablet computers” with Ubuntu and OpenID (worst name ever for a product attempting broad acceptance). They could honestly give a shit whether it’s a closed or open system. And, let’s be really honest, they probably care as much about DRM as they do about baseball players juicing; by which I mean not very much at all. They want things to work most of the time, and be easy to fix when they don’t. And if the process by which it happens is “magic” they are totally cool with that.

They want the thing in the movies.

This is a concept that’s been banging around in my head for a while now. Ask most geeks if, given the opportunity, they would want a device like the PADD from Star Trek. Hell, ask them if they would want the whole Star Trek computing experience (“Computer, download all available pornography with the keywords, ‘asian,’ ‘big titties’ and ‘lesbian’”). I think most would say yes. But, when confronted with what well may be the genesis of that model, they run

Continue reading Mike Monteiro Fucking Gets It

Fraser Speirs nails it yet again with a blog post titled iPad Fallacy #1: “It’s not for content creation”. In the post he poses the question:

I keep hearing this thing on the web that the iPad is “a consumption device, not a creation device”. I don’t know why people keep saying that. It’s fast enough, it has enough storage and it has some seriously powerful applications. If that’s your opinion, please enlighten me in the comments.

Fraser continues on to completely debunk this fallacy by showing screenshots from Apple’s iWork demonstrations during the introductory event. To me though, the really interesting thing is answering the question that Fraser poses: “Why do people keep saying that?” I think that, in many cases, the reason people keep making that claim is actually an off-shoot of the same “Future Shock” that Fraser himself described before. Or, to pimp my own work, I think that statements that the iPad is “just for content consumption” are further examples of nerd myopia.

Like most things in the real world, responses to the iPad are not a simple binary “love it” or “hate it” proposition. In between the people who dismiss

Continue reading iPad Dismissal